Rainbows in stories are not just symbolic, but also prone to traits that actual rainbows never exhibit, the most common being solidity, treating the rainbow as an object that can be interacted with.

Because rainbows seem to travel from the ground to the sky (and back, if complete), they are usually seen in mythology as some kind of bridge or other connection point to and from heaven; in Norse Mythology the rainbow is Bifrost, the bridge to Asgard; in Greek Mythology, Iris is the goddess of the rainbow as well as the messenger of the gods (Which makes this Older Than Feudalism). In Ireland, a rainbow's base is also a great place to keep a pot of gold (in fact, it serves as a perfect hiding place, since it's impossible to reach). In The Bible, the rainbow is a pledge that the world will never again be flooded to destroy all living things. Meanwhile in Japan, a rainbow is traditionally an ill omen, of doom or at least bad weather, though the Western perspective has become more widespread there.

Some people even associate rainbows with ULTIMATE POWER, of all things.

Since rainbows are natural phenomena of great power, it's also reasonable to give them to actual characters and forces within a story. Expect some of the flashier Anime characters to use them directly as a weapon or to incorporate them somehow into Ki Attacks. They're also a common symbol in worlds known for their Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors, as a representation of a character's equal dedication to each element. Finally, they are known in some circles to be extremely girly and are often a symbol of Camp Gayness.

Examples of natural Rainbows as objects

Advertising

There was once a Skittles commercial in which some kids were sitting on a rainbow, eating Skittles. When one questioned the plausibility of this, part of the rainbow opened up beneath him like a trapdoor and he fell to his death. Don't question the rainbow.

In the Code Geass opening, "World End", there's a scene of Nunnally, a blind, crippled girl, throwing a paper crane that trails a rainbow and sparkles. Whether or not it has meaning is up to the viewer.

A rainbow appears in Gundam 00 after the Gundam Meisters successfully rescue Allelujah and Marina, making a dramatic escape. This can be justified by the amount of water thrown into the air from Ptolemios II's plunge into the ocean.

Rainbows and the colors of the rainbow are a central theme in Brigadoon: Marin and Melan. It's highlighted by the ending theme, "Rainbow-colored Treasure."

The Book of Lost Tales (the precursor to The Silmarillion), featured the Olórë Mallë (Path of Dreams) over which the spirits of children in Middle-earth would travel in their sleep to meet the Elves in Valinor; this was implied to be a rainbow.

In a story told in The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the children of the Creator slipped through a rift in creation to chase a rainbow and got trapped, becoming the stars.

In The Last Continent, after the rain returns to FourEcks, the Man Who Carries The Universe In A Sack produces a boomerang decorated with more colours than the Ecksian Aborigine boy has ever seen in one place, and throws it at the sky, where it sticks.

In Warbreaker, more breath will create an aura of brighter color around a person. if the person takes this to insane levels (which only the god king has reached), White objects will gain a prismatic appearance.

Rainbow Islands. A game where solid rainbows are used both to attack enemies and to create platforms for climbing.

In Pokémon Black and White, there is a new combination move that creates a rainbow that raises the chance of added effects from moves (for example, Thunderbolt will have a higher chance of causing paralysis).

In Team Fortress 2 the Rainblower is a weapon that shots rainbows, or at least that`s what the user sees.

Subverted in We Happy Few. Both the natural world and Wellington Wells are extremely colorful, but while the subdued colors of the natural world tend to be quite soothing, the bright and obnoxious rainbow motif of Wellington Wells should induce the same fear that a poisonous frog does.

Played straight in Star Sky if the player takes the rainy path and stops after passing by the house. The sky will fill with an enormous rainbow that makes for one of the most beautiful scenes in the game.

Web Animation

In the Strong Bad Email "flashback," Coach Z and Strong Bad travel on a "sweet, sweet rainbow bridge" from the moon back to Earth.

In The Inexplicable Adventures of Bob! Oogrook the little unicorn tends to be flanked by rainbows. The absurdity of doing this in a black and white comic is lampshaded by labeling the stripes "red," orange," "yellow," etc.

The Fairly OddParents has a rainbow bridge connecting Earth to Fairy World. It's unclear where exactly this bridge's Earthly end is located, and the bridge is rarely used in favor of teleportation between the worlds.

G1 My Little Pony had the Rainbow of Light, which tended to be a go-to weapon of sorts.

In the world of My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, rainbows are made in a weather factory, where it's shown in liquid form. Pinkie Pie, who had previously been shown to relish cupcakes that had been slathered in copious amounts of intensely spicy hot sauce, tried tasting liquid rainbow and wound up fleeing in a firey panic. There's also the traditional, non-liquid form, possibly the finished product; both are used in the landscaping of Rainbow Dash's cloud home. Rainbow Dash creates a rainbow-colored streak behind her when she flies fast enough and is also able to perform a stunt known as the "Sonic Rainboom", a.k.a. the"Orbital Friendship Cannon", which is exactly what it sounds like. The Apple family also occasionally harvests magical Zap Apples that only appear under certain rare weather conditions and are rainbow patterned when they ripen.

And if you want ultimate power, you want the season four finale. In the premiere there's a mystery box of plot importance with six keyholes. One by one the cast will have a realization about what they should have done and work to set things right; when they do, an object relating to the situation will reflect rainbow-colored light into their eyes, causing their eyes to glow with rainbow color. In the final battle of the season, each one takes the form of a 'rainbow power key' to open the box and give them the new, toyetic Rainbow Power upgrades; this let them beat a villain that was more than a match for all the god-tier characters combined by the end.

There was also a G3DTV movie in which a Rainbow Princess had to make rainbows for the entire kingdom, or else everything would lose its color. Though, their rainbow only had four colors in it, so when the colors did start disappearing, there were several large, unaffected areas.

And you can be forgiven for blocking the memory due to the horror, but the Newborn Cuties web shorts show that Sweetie Belle was created when two rainbows crossed. Rainbows are life! Also, that adds some Fridge Horror to The Runaway Rainbow: The world losing its color would suck, but if rainbows are how new ponies are born, no rainbows because the first rainbow of spring wasn't made on time would be very bad indeed. (Of course, it's also these shorts where we meet actual parents, and G3 Scootaloo was introduced as Cheerilee's sister. Maybe Sweetie Belle is a special case.)

Used in the logo of The Amazing World of Gumball; Tobias and his family/species has a rainbow color scheme as well. Also, there's apparently a placed called a Rainbow Factory where Nicole works and which Masami's dad owns.

In Fanboy and Chum Chum the titular characters squeeze one out of the leprechaun cereal mascot Lucky Charlie's butt in the episode "Lucky Chumps". A myriad of "Double Rainbow" references predictably ensue.

In The Smurfs, rainbows serve as bridges between the Earth and the Land of Myth, which Blue Eyes the pegasus uses to cross between worlds.

Real Life

Became an internet phenomenon after this clip quickly spread like wildfire, going through various remixes, alterations and mutations along the way.

Double rainbows are very common, though the second one is often much fainter, and is reversed, with red at the bottom and violet at the top. You can also, rarely see a triple rainbow, with the third one even fainter, but the right way.

Yu-Gi-Oh! GX has Johan's Rainbow Dragon card, itself summoned via having the seven colors of the Rainbow in their beast forms already present.

Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's: After summoning the three polar gods in a non-duel Team Ragnorok activated the spell card "The Rainbow Bridge Bifrost" (not to be confused with with the card "Rainbow Bridge Bifrost, without the "The") to get Yusei and co up to the Arc Cradle.

In Captain Earth, Albion's read, Teppei's singularity is creating a circular rainbow out of thin air. Doesn't sound very impressive, but his sword and shield in Kiltgang form are also made of rainbows and he's regarded as quite powerful.

In Kill la Kill, Kiryuin Ragyu has spectra in the underside of her hair, and rainbows figure in several of her garments. This may tie in with the Japanese view of rainbows as symbol of calamity, as she's the Big Bad in the series. Also, it indicates her connection with life fibers, which also emit rainbow sparkles on occasion.

Detective Comics #241 featured a story titled "The Rainbow Batman". In the story, Dick Grayson injures his arm while in public, making going out as Robin risky. As luck would have it, Batman's latest case requires Robin's assistance to help identify the crooks, which is a problem given that the case takes place at an event attracting media attention. Batman ceates some differently colored uniforms (as well as a bullseye uniform) for himself to wear to distract the crowds from Robin's injury, culminating with the titlar Rainbow Batman outfit.

A super villain called the Firefly fired a rainbow out of his belt to attack Batman and Robin. See it here◊.

The Flash has an enemy called Rainbow Raider, who can use rainbows as Hard Light constructs and manipulate emotions based on the color that hits his targets. Ironically, he's colorblind.

The cover of The Incredible Hulk #355 has a super character named Glorian using a rainbow against the title hero, as seen here◊.

Blackhawk. On the cover of Blackhawk #156, a villain called the Plutonian Raider fires rainbow beams to paralyze the protagonists.

Film

Generating a rainbow out of the spikes on his back was the main form of attack for Barugon, Gamera's very first foe in War of the Monsters (a.k.a. Gamera vs. Barugon).

Literature

In Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Iris sends messages for the characters when they throw coins into rainbows. Real rainbows, creating occasions where they have to quickly fudge up some spray to generate one.

In Warbreaker, the God King, or any other person with a sufficient amount of Breath, causes anything white in his vicinity to produce rainbows. These colours can then be used to power Awakenings.

From Jack Vance's Dying Earth, the Excellent Prismatic Spray is a widely-known spell that instantly kills anyone it's cast on and the reason so many spells in other media are named "Prismatic Whatever"

The game has a long history with powerful rainbow spells. The weaker effects can blind or otherwise temporarily disable enemies, while the more powerful versions, the "prismatic" spells, have a separate effect for every color of the rainbow, ranging from very high damage (of three different elements) to instant death, being turned to stone, or being banished to another dimension. As every effect has to be resisted separately, this resulted in these spells being difficult to bypass and resist. 3.5 Edition has the Initiate of the Seven Veils, a set of magical prismatic veils and more rainbow spells. Also, the most powerful wizard isn't some battlemage throwing around fireballs - it's Rainbow Brite. This causes massive confusion amongst newbies, who expect the flashy fireballs to be more powerful than shooting rainbows, when the reverse is invariably true - the strongest first level spell is generally agreed to be Color Spray (which shoots a rainbow of colors out to blind and stun enemies).

Dungeon magazine #45 adventure "Prism Keep". When the Rainbow Crystal is activated, a rainbow appears between the Crystal and the castle floating overhead. The rainbow will take everyone in the area up to the castle.

Warhammer 40,000 -Back at the very start of Warhammer 40k with Rogue Trader, there was a Space Marine chapter listed called the Rainbow Warriors.

The Compleat ArduinBook 2: Resources

A number of spells use or create rainbows as part of their effects.

Sporling's Wall of Whimsey: Creates a wall of pulsing rainbow light that confuses anyone who passes through it.

Santander's Wasp Conjuration: Summons a rainbow-colored wasp that can be used to attack creatures.

Jastrakahn's Conjuration of the Resplendent Repulsion Area: A rainbow colored glow emanates from the caster.

In Chrono Trigger, there's a sidequest to gather a chromatic "rainbow shell," from which several of the game's most powerful items are made. And in Chrono Cross where you see what a weapon made from rainbow shell should actually look like.

In Kirby: Canvas Curse, you control Kirby using a magical paintbrush that paints rainbow-colored lines as paths for Kirby. After defeating the final boss, a rainbow also appears in the sky in the game's ending.

Mori Motonari, the resident sun-worshipper of Sengoku Basara, carries a rainbow blade as one of his weapons. Subverted in that this does not make him a nice guy.

In the BIT.TRIP games, CommanderVideo always leaves a rainbow trail behind him for no apparent reason. In RUNNER in particular, you have to reach Extra Mode (via collecting Mode Power Ups) to get the rainbow. And the ending features the Five-Man Band lifting off with individual trials matching the rainbow's colors in these games.

Sonic Colors naturally. Especially the final color blaster used on Eggman in the final battle.

de Blob, being all about colour, naturally uses this. Often you'll be asked to paint things in a Chromatic Arrangement, and in the sequel there is a Rainbow Powerup that automatically makes Blob the right color for a given object.

Oh, so, very subverted in Update 2 of Five Nights at Freddy's World. Chica's Magic Rainbow is the featured character of the minigame of the same name. She starts out encouraging the player, then turns into a Jerkass who berates the player, eventually killing the player herself if the player takes too long. She's also the True Final Boss of Update 2, is one of the hardest bosses to defeat, and, again, kills the party with one hit kills if the timer runs out.

Webcomics

In The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, Sparklelord is a unicorn with a rainbow-colored mane in his home dimension. When transported to McNinja's dimension, he takes the form of a sentient motorcycle with flippin' sweet rainbow markings on it. (Although Gordito mocks him for looking like a Lisa Frank creation.)

In "We Are All Pokémon Trainers", Spectrum the Flygon literally speaks in rainbows. Her voice breaks physics, and does not go unnoticed by those who hear her.

Western Animation

The Rainicorn, from Adventure Time. Half unicorn, half rainbow. Doesn't get much more girly-awesome than that.

Rainbow Brite, naturally. She uses the power of colours in rainbow form to keep everything happy and bright and colourful in Rainbowland, as well as on Earth. When Rainbow Brite is unable to fulfil her duties, colours quick start to fade and everything becomes rather gloomy... Rainbow Brite can also weaponise her rainbow beams to deflect attacks or even to launch attacks directly at baddies force them away/trap them. Not just all that, but her rainbows are also strong enough to allow Rainbow Brite to ride over them on her horse Starlight. And lastly, she uses these rainbows to travel all the way from Rainbowland to Earth!

In the Disney Fairies franchise, light-talent fairies control and manipulate rainbows.

In the Spongebob Squarepants episode "Idiot Box", a Running Gag involves Spongebob making a semi-figurative rainbow with his hands to illustrate the power of imagination.

In the first episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, a band of leprechauns (well, and a half-Korean) use a machine to create rainbows that can be used to mug people.

An episode of Rocko's Modern Life where he said he likes rainbows freaks out the other characters.

Care Bears: The entire series seems to reek in terms of rainbows as decorations, traveling devices, energy, and for that matter, weapons.

God, the Devil and Bob: God creates a double rainbow to cheer up the people of Detroit (in a way that won't make the atheists feel left out). For his next trick, he makes a DMV run efficiently and politely.

The original cartoons, including The Movie, used the Rainbow of Light as their one and only weapon. It tended to act like a Care-Bear Stare — reviving good characters but rounding up the not-so-good and outright destroying the evil. In fact, the movie's the only time when the Rainbow of Light fails.

It's not neglected in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, either, although it's done with the 'Elements of Harmony'. Similar effects, aside from 'outright destroying' the evilnote King Sombra is the only villain who actually died in the series thus far, but the Elements of Harmony weren't involved at all in the two-part episode in question. The season 4 finale replaces the Elements of Harmony with something outright called "Rainbow Power", which does essentially the same thing, but possibly better.

One of the characters in the Friendship Is Magic series is Rainbow Dash, a pegasus with a rainbow colored mane, and the only one to have achieved the Sonic Rainboom. This happens when she breaks the sound barrier (or goes from supersonic to hypersonic or something) and creates a rainbow explosion that can be seen miles away, after which she trails a rainbow behind her as she flies for a moment. In one episode, she used it to demolish a barn by flying straight down at it, creating a rainbow-coloured mushroom cloud.

The Tom Terrific story arc "The End Of Rainbows" has Tom and Manfred helping painter Rembrandt Von Rainbow complete his latest rainbow by fetching the colors he needs.

In The Smurfs episode "Smurf-Colored Glasses", Handy uses a rainbow in a waterfall to give his smurf-colored glasses the ability to see people and things are being cute and handsome instead of ordinary, ugly, or dangerous.

In Gravity Falls short Mabel's Guide to Colors, Mabel tries to get Grunkle Stan to like colors by reflecting a rainbow to his office, when he opens the curtains he is blinded by bright light of the rainbows.

Examples of Rainbows as symbols

Anime and Manga

In the Yume Tsukai manga, the author invoke that, in Japanese culture, rainbows used to be seen as unnatural distressing phenomena at best and as bad omens as worst, and that the optimistic connotations were brought only recently. Then this symbolism is milked for all its worth by using rainbows to symbolize the doomed relationship of the first seen client of the Yume Tsukai and the unnatural, girly-looking boy who serves to channel the Eldritch Abomination who wanted to took over the school and the world.

In Oh, God! You Devil!, God makes a rainbow appear in the night sky above Las Vegas in order to confirm that he has heard Bobby Shelton's prayer.

Literature

In The Bible, following the Genesis flood, God sent a rainbow as a symbol that he had set aside his bow, and that he would never again destroy the earth through cataclysmic flooding. (Also of interest: according to a biblical literalist/creationist reading of Genesis, the Flood was the first time it had ever rained.)

In The Lord of the Rings, Saruman the White electively promoted himself to "the Many Colored" to indicate he had evolved beyond a mere monochromatic title. Gandalf pointed out that a beam of white light broken into a rainbow is no longer white, so Saruman hadn't improved his worth so much as fractured it. As the color of each Wizard apparently symbolized the individual Vala he served, Saruman's rainbow robes could well symbolize his fall from grace: Morgoth was the only Vala to have a share of all the others' powers.

In The Wheel of Time, the Aes Sedai organisation is made up of seven distinct "Ajahs" each of which are devoted to a specific area of study or action. The organisation's flag shows a spiral of the seven colors, as does the headdress of their leader, the Amyrlin Seat. Since this symbol incorporates gray, brown and white into its overal scheme, this isn't a strict rainbow, but is evocative of such anyway.

A Song of Ice and Fire uses refractive crystals and rainbows as symbols of the Faith of the Seven. As a rainbow has seven colors, it's taken in the same sense as the three-leaf clover is sometimes viewed as symbolic of the Holy Trinity.

Pinball

The playfield design of Spectrum is a set of multicolored rainbows interrupted by black circuit boards.

At the end of The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask, the Moon dissolves in a globe of multicoloured light, and leaves a rainbow streaked across the sky for all to see. This is probably a symbol in the biblical style, a sign that a great calamity has passed.

In Tokimeki Memorial, there's Saki Nijino, the bright and cheerful manager of Kirameki High's Soccer Club. The Kanji used for her name, "Nijino", can be translated as "Field of Rainbow" ; thus, the rainbow is one of the two main elements (along with a soccer ball) in the cover, title screen, and ending of the spin-off game she's the heroine of, Nijiiro no Seishun. Also, her two CD albums' names are "Over the Rainbow" and "Niji no Lithograph" (Rainbow Lithograph).

JoJo's Circus had an episode in which the characters chased a rainbow and did a rainbow dance.

The animated version of Punky Brewster starts right off telling how Glomer strayed from his home Chaundoon within a rainbow and became stranded in Chicago when the rainbow disappeared. One episode, "Be My Glomley", had Punky and her pals helping Glomer and a female glomley, Glomine, return to Chaundoon by creating a rainbow.

Real Life

The rainbow (specifically, the Rainbow Flag) is used most widely in the Western world as a symbol of gay pride.

Demetri Martin: I just think it's odd one group took refracted light. Pretty greedy, gay people.

The Quechua people of Peru, better known as the Incas, use a rainbow flag (it used to be the personal flag of the Emperor).

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